“I heard old Cracky Wainright say he seen two black snakes come together, and they was both mad. He seen they was going to fight, so he stood and watched them. The one got ahold of the other one’s tail and began to swallow it. And the other one got ahold of the other one’s tail and began to swallow him. He said they kept on fighting and swallowing one another until both snakes was swallowed. There wasn’t any snake left there at all.”

Grant also told Halpert a story about a piney who went around for a long time claiming that he had a pair of horns in his shack seventeen feet from tip to tip. People liked this brief story and kept asking the man to tell it. Eventually, as Grant remembered it, “He said no, that was one lie he had told so much he believed it himself. He said he had told about putting the horns up in the middle of his shack so much he believed they was there. So he said the last time he was there he made up his mind he would crawl up there and see if there was anything there. He said he went up there and there they was—seventeen foot from tip to tip.”

The year before that, elsewhere in the pines, one man alone set sixty-nine fires. He was, at the time, a policeman in a town on the edge of the woods. After his actions became known, he was described by surprised neighbors as “a good family man” and “a nice guy.” He himself “discovered” and reported all sixty-nine fires, usually calling them in on the police radio, and when he had been placed under arrest he couldn’t explain why he had felt compelled to set the woods ablaze.

“They are weeds of civilization,” said Wherry. “So is ebony spleenwort,” he added, and he pulled up an ebony spleenwort, which is a small fern, and explained that it is not native to the Pine Barrens, nor could it be, because the soil there is too acid for it. Wherever man has used lime to build structures, however, ebony spleenwort can be found. Spores come in on the wind from heaven knows what distances. Often this alien plant is the only existing sign that a house—or a town—once stood where it grows. Ebony spleenwort is found in abundance around the building sites in all the vanished towns, but it is found nowhere else in the pines.

When prospective buyers actually came to see the land, promoters tied pears and apples to the limbs of pine trees and stationed fishermen in small boats in Pine Barrens lakes with dead pickerel on the ends of their lines and instructions to pull the fish out of the water every ten minutes.